With his new studio record Remembering Now, the 47th in a storied career, Van Morrison continues on his prolific run of recording and releasing high quality music. In fact, with this new album, he has taken his current expression of creativity to a higher, yet familiar level.

Morrison’s contemporary work has been rooted in albums packed with a mixture of ornery R&B and jazz. He even recently released a skiffle record! These recent recordings, while enjoyable, sometimes find Morrison as an performer on the shore line. An observer, perhaps unable to truly submerse himself into the once plentiful currents of unencumbered inspiration.

Remembering Now isn’t so much a return to form, but a rediscovery. What separates it from Morrison’s other recordings is his willing visitation of the past and investigation of the thematic essence of his musical being.

It appears, Morrison has come to terms, and has reached a point in his career where a look back is as vital look forward.

In a interview with Uncut, Morrison spoke about composing songs for 2025’s Remembering Now, “The concept of the flow is beyond thought, beyond analysis,” Morrison says. By successfully re-accessing this ‘flow,’ Morrison has sourced a gurgling ancient spring of inspiration and allowed himself to be caught in the current, willfully imbibing a newly found sense of wonder and in turn acceptance of his past and his future.

Morrison’s recent work has been tinged with annoyance and a curmudgeonly view of an unforgiving world. With Remembering Now, Morrison has regained his curiosity and through a communion of spirit and rekindling of his relationship with the “flow.” has created a piece of work that harkens back to his best art, while still staying true to his forward thinking creative wont.

The record strolls on the dampened and leaf scattered paths of Cyprus Avenue and Hyndford Street, before returning home to drop the needle on a Ray Charles 7″ single. The record pays tribute to time, through the summer fields of youth and the frosty hills found at the end of the line. With heart open wide Morrison welcomes it all, and shares it with us, hand on his brow pointing out historic silhouettes pressed against the landscape of expansive musical vistas.

Morrison sings of spirit, soul, memories and visions as opposed to media, government officials and Covid regulations. It’s not that these previous subjects are irrelevant, but for a man who has constructed his musical career on captivating through apparitional alchemy, Remembering Now is a welcome return home. As he says on the title track, “This is who I am.”

Musical seeds that were planted over the last few years of live performance have blossomed into an all encompassing and expansive new studio recording. No matter the impetus, Morrison has created an album that takes the best parts of yesterday and tomorrow and combines it into a stunning meditation for today.

The record spins like the cycle of the seasons. There is a unknown presence in each of the album’s 14 songs. A sonic redolence of the past, present, and future collaborating in stunning musicality.

Morrison’s previous refusal to look back on past glories are what makes him an uncompromising artist, and a stubborn creative. With Remembering Now, Morrison peers over his shoulder and understands that sometimes things are worth taking a peak at. Breaking the seal on a long closed door, Morrison sounds at ease, willing to let something else lead the way instead of directing it himself.

The album begins with the Celtic cool of “Down to Joy,” Morrison is assured, his band R & B tight and swinging with a champion boxers confidence and gait.

“Haven’t Lost My Sense of Wonder,” follows and could have been the title track of the record as the theme of wonderment ties together the entire collection. The song is a microcosm of the thematic arc of the recording, emitting a mystical pulse and expressing a joy of discovery that is inherent in all of Morrison’s best work. His vocals are earnest and beautifully resigned to the fact that the time for acceptance has arrived.

“If It Wasn’t For Ray,” is a heartfelt tribute to Ray Charles, along the lines of “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile)”. The song is highlighted by a wonderful wordless vocal melody line that dances in conjunction with the bleating horns.

In the sweet embrace of the compelling “Back to Writing Love Songs,” Morrison asks, ‘What about soul and inspiration, what about taking it right back to the day? Gotta get my mojo working, got to tell you baby what I say.” A juicy melody and an unabashed admittance of Morrison’s turning over of a new leaf.

The record features an robust array of instrumentation, a hallmark of Morrison’s current work. The band decorates the compositions with sympathetic playing, enveloping swells of strings, joyous organ washes and Morrison’s understated guitar and saxophone work.

“Once in a Lifetime Feelings,” is a favorite, and it nestles a quintessential Morrison melody close. The song contains Morrison’s bristling guitar work and pliable singing, both indiscernible from any of his previous era’s. While his vocal range may have diminished slightly, his ability to reverberate off the walls of an arrangement is more than intact.

“Stomping Ground,” is a loving adolescent travelogue, exploring the biographical landscape with themes already probed on the record. Morrison’s mid-song saxophone solo is bristling and inspired. The introspective recollections continue with the contemplative drift of “Memories and Visions,” and the rustic recall of “When the Rains Came.”

“When the Rains Came,” emotes a dreamlike elegance that finds Morrison unfurling his voice and acoustic guitar in sympathetic simpatico. The song sounds like moss settled on stone, and is beyond description in its form.

The penultimate song on the record and it’s dramatic title track, “Remembering Now,” a swirling dreamscape of soul, memory and self awareness. Call and response vocalizations and their reiteration through the verses distill the record down to its essential elements. The band rises and falls with Morrison’s stream of conscious rhyming, rolling and rapping, conjuring sensations with sound, sensory through recall, magic through song.

“Stretching Out,” follows, and is mined from the same rich vein of inspiration as “Remembering Now,” and acts as the climatic transcendental heart of of Remembering Now. The song is a nine plus minute incantation bringing the vision of “Shady Lane,” into resplendent clarity. It’s all at once hypnotic, elastic, and its spell only broken by the delightful major key change that appears like a cloud before dissipating back into the central syncopated mantra.

The epic harkens back to Morrison’s epics, “Madame George,” “Listen to the Lion,” and “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River,” the song where Morrison originally discovered what real soul was down on the shady lane.

This concluding musical vision is structured through repetition and gently improvised melodic alchemy. Developed in real time, the song is an evocative manifestation of Morrison’s musical soul and his creative intent. The music is active and moves in a way that gives it life. The strings soar toward the sun, basking in the golden summer time, moving into the algid shade where Morrison’s scalar vocal improvisations bring tears to my eyes. The song ends and I feel like I’ve been through something.

It should come as no surprise that Van Morrison has provided us with a record of this stature. He is a lofty summit in the mountainous landscape of rock and roll; a signpost for unabashed and uncompromising artistic creation. What is surprising, is his willingness to revisit the backstreets of his life, his Belfast, his records, his loves, his influences. While in the throughs of this reminiscence, the ‘flow’ revealed it’s crystal waters, it’s understanding eddy’s, and influential currents. Morrison joined the flow in invocation and let himself be carried away into a remembering of now. By doing so, he has has unequivocally confirmed that he is still indeed, Van the man.